Reading CLOUD ATLAS

Cloud Atlas is not a sugary sweet tale of “interconnectedness,” a masterwork of making Tom Hanks look as divergent as possible, a gimmicky post-modern style of story-telling, yet another exposition of the “butterfly effect,” or an attempt to proselytize reincarnation. It’s much more robust than media is letting on.

Have you read David Mitchell’s excellent Cloud Atlas, published in 2004? As I was reading it, I was as nervous as I was engaged. Engaged because Mitchell is both a mesmerizing story-teller and the teller of a great story. Nervous that his nested style of storytelling would either overshadow content, or leave loose ends untied. There’s nothing to worry about here. Leaving me counting down the days until it’s film release, slated for Friday October 26.

Though I don’t think media should be used to judge a film, I do think it’s appropriate to allow a book to judge it’s translation. Here’s what fired my synapsis in the book, and what I’ll need to see in the film to be as impressed as review audiences.

Reading CLOUD ATLASFirst, a word on its genre. Words like “saga”, postmodern, “epic mind bender,” or “Russian nested dolls” may all be accurate but they miss the larger point. This is an apocalyptic story chronicling the rise and fall of civilization from 1830 into the distant future. Here you see the seeds, symptoms, bloatedness, and after effects of power run amok. Like all good apocalyptic literature, the more an author connects with current reality, the more power of analysis the story has. It asks us where we’re heading and why in that direction, and what sent us there. And this story has a lot of power. Cloud Atlas belongs on the shelf beside The Road, Oryx and Crake, The Hunger Games, The Matrix, 1984, and Animal Farm.

Second, if apocalyptic is the genre, the story itself is the abuse of power. In six stories, all of which can stand on their own, he imagines what unfolds when one person or group claims dominance over another, putting self interest over the common good. The landscape of soul and society he paints is both heartbreaking and convicting. And the more hopeless he paints the world, the tighter his indictment of Nietzsche’s Will to Power and Ayn Rand’s Social Darwinism becomes. “If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation and bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, and histories [antaganists] shall prevail. You and I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds.”

How have humans abused power and expressed dominance in the real and fictional world? Mitchell uses at least the following to move his story forward: Friendship, Race, Religious Mission, Colonization, Nationalism, Corporitization, Hierarchy, Otherization, and Dehumanization.

If I say this is about class struggle or those on the margins being in tension with those in power you might too easily dismiss the point. It’s more internally focused. Pushing us to examine the narratives we unconsciously live by that define and sustain the borders between us. As Thomas Merton, said in the 1960s: “Instead of hating the people you think are war makers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war.” [366 Ways to Peace Calendar, Herald Press.]

In one key scene where a rebel is interviewed by the regime, the interviewer implores disbelief at what he’s heard, “It’s unconscionable, no, it’s blasphemy!… I am impelled to say, what you saw, must have been a [fictional] set, created for your benefit [by the Revolutionaries]…The Beloved Chairman would never permit it…No crime of such magnitude could take root” in our country. Elsewhere he quips that they live in the sturdiest social pyramid ever constructed!

In other words, blindness granted by the doctrine of National Exceptionalism (either in the fictional or real world) is the granting of permission for injustice to occur. Her response is telling, “In a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only ‘rights,’ the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.”

Third, there are two primary ways Cloud Atlas unpacks the abuse of power. 6 years before the Supreme Court Case Citizens United determined that corporations have peoplehood, Mitchell imagines a world completely authored and sustained by corporate interests. Every shoe is now a nike, every coffee a starbuck, every car a ford. But also every decision a consumer decision. Every social gradation of power based on purchasing capacity, every border delineating space between consumer and producer, every ecological “deadzone” a necessary step of economic development. There are the haves, and the have nots; and for Mitchell these are writ large through what he terms Corpocracy, the corporitization of the state.

Jesus said you can not serve both God and mammon. Ayn Rand of course agreed with this, choosing mammon in her hallmark Atlas Shrugged. Mitchell unmasks this for what it really is: morally bankrupt at every level.

But he also unpacks the abuse of power by exploring Violence on many levels, particularly imperialism and colonization. In a near final scene that solidified this books worth in my mind, a debate rages regarding “Why is it that the musket came to the White man and not, say, the Esquimeau or the Pygmy…?” The Christian missionary surmises it is because of the “august will of the Almighty” that “leads Humanity up the ladder towards the

godhead” and thus justifies enormous violent oppression and extermination. While the man of science rebuts it is rather humanities’ will to power. Another character chimes, “What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature… you can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions, and the borders of states…the nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions.”

Both philosophies have wrecked havoc in our own world, and, when read in light of the cross and teachings of Jesus Christ, are blasphemous idolatries.

As in most apocalyptic literature, Mitchell’s social analysis (his loud “No!”) outweighs his creative solutions. But create he does, giving hope that Cloud Atlas need not be our own future.

This is how I’ll be “reading” the film this weekend. In the hands of the Wachowski’s of Matrix fame, I have high hopes in this fantastic, fascinating anti-corporate, anti-violence story being told in marvelous form on the big screen.

What did you “read” in Cloud Atlas?

Here’s a trailer, which looks brilliant to me, but which keeps all of the above secret: